She was not alone, but she was exposed and his rage and his hate exploded through him and he leaped at her and grabbed her by the throat and was about to rip her head off with his bare hands, but then he recognized a new truth.

“Who are you?” he asked her. “Tell me who you are.”

Gina came up beside him, breathing hard, paused for a moment, then leaped at the four figures behind the women, smashing into them with such force that all four went flying off into the dark, their infrared detection equipment shattering around them.

Then Mark saw that one of the figures had come up from the floor and was deploying an all-too-familiar weapon. He was unfolding a Metal Storm.

Gina saw it, too, and backed off.

The gun clicked, clicked again. The figure opening it seemed to be moving in slow motion. Around him, the other three appeared almost still.

“We’re in flicker,” Mark snapped at Gina.

They got the Storms out of the hands of two of the soldiers and slammed magazines into them. It happened so fast that the soldiers’ fingers continued to work. Their nervous systems had not yet signaled to their brains that the guns were gone.

Before either of them could aim the weapons, and despite their speed in flicker, the creature that had first confronted them in this tunnel now came on them again, reached out, clutched Gina’s fatigues, and dragged her toward itself.

Mark felt sorrow, but he would have let her go to her fate if that would have advanced the mission. She was still essential, though, so he threw himself after her.

At that moment, he also saw that the men who had been attempting to deploy the Metal Storms appeared to be Delta Force operators.

He could no longer see Gina, who was now invisible behind the creature.

One of the operators got his Storm running.

“Fire it,” Mark shouted, “fire it into that thing.”

The weapon thundered—and the skin of the creature evaporated like so much sea foam. For a moment, Mark was completely uncomprehending. Then he realized the truth. This fourth-generation creature was very, very different and very new. It was an idea that could manifest in the physical—and that was where it had been torn apart by the Metal Storm—at the perfect moment, while it was in its vulnerable, physical form.

Yet there it was again, the great head high, the eyes filled with what Mark could only see as triumph. He threw himself at it—and then, to his horrified surprise, was inside it, and wherever he went, musculature appeared, entangling him in guts and sinew.

Was it an illusion, then? If so, a convincing one, because the muscles were like iron cables, and hot, and all around him was the surge and a rumble of a great, organic presence.